


Cloak and Dagger

by Owlship



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Assassins & Hitmen, F/M, Fluff, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Misunderstandings, Pre-Relationship, also sort of, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-26
Updated: 2017-01-26
Packaged: 2018-09-19 23:15:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9464834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Owlship/pseuds/Owlship
Summary: Furiosa hadn't meant to click the title reading "i need someone to take out the trash" but the page loaded before she could hit escape. She scanned the text with disinterest- she certainly wasn't going to become someone's maid- but quickly realized that this person wasn't talking about some overflowing garbage bins.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is an old thing that I never posted because it really _wanted_ to have a big huge police-procedural plot that I just.... didn't want to write, until I finally realized I had enough to post anyway and said 'fuck it'.
> 
> Inspired by a tumblr prompt, "I'm broke as fuck so I responded to your ad on Craigslist to 'take out the trash' but it turns out you were looking for a hitman, so I'm very worried but also curious why someone who looks as innocent and frightened as you needs a hitman"

The only reason Furiosa was even browsing the classifieds website in the first place was that she needed a new couch, and fuck if she was going to spend money buying something new that would only get covered in stains better left unidentified in a month's time anyway.

The pickings were pretty slim- she had started to wonder if she should take her Aunt Mozzie up on the offer of her old floral monstrosity after all, cat smell or no- and she had, at some point, started clicking ads completely at random. Someone lost their pet bird, this person had a horribly overpriced old motorbike for sale, yet another thinly-veiled prostitution ad.

Furiosa hadn't meant to click the title reading " _i need someone to take out the trash_ " but the page loaded before she could hit escape. She scanned the text with disinterest- she certainly wasn't going to become someone's maid- but quickly realized that this person wasn't talking about some overflowing garbage bins.

" _injured & in over my head. i need someone to take care of this problem. will pay cash, no questions as long as it's cleaned up asap. email me for details_"

Well. Furiosa read the ad a few more times, coming to the same conclusion each time. There was no name, no pictures, nothing but the same gut feeling that had been honed by years of working with abuse victims. Her intuition was telling her that this person was locked in a bad enough relationship that they were looking for drastic solutions of the illegal variety, and while she wasn't willing to actually kill someone again- at least, not for a stranger- she knew that she was better equipped to deal with the situation than most people.

Technically she worked at a farmer's co-op with the rest of her family, but most of her day was taken up with helping people- usually women, though they'd dealt with people of nearly ever gender before- out of abusive situations. It was draining work but she had the resources, and nothing beat getting to watch the transformations that occurred when a former victim started feeling safe enough to fight back.

She typed out a short email- " _Hi, I saw your ad about the trash. I think I can help. What can you tell me_?"

Innocuous enough if this person's communications were being monitored, as was fairly likely if they were reaching out in code. It only took a few minutes for a reply to pop up.

" _thank you!!! it's just too much for me right now. when can you come over? it's getting bad in here and i don't know how much longer i can stand it_ "

Furiosa glanced over at the clock- it was only a bit past four, so depending on how far away this person was she would have plenty of time to scope out the situation before most offices let out for the day.

" _I have time to stop by for an assessment today if that's alright, just let me know your address_."

" _an assessment?? for what?? look i just need this garbage out of here, can you help or not_?"

She cursed under her breath. Of course that would look suspicious, it wasn't as if this person was pretending to be looking for a cleaning service.

" _My apologies, I usually do long-term work to keep problems like this from happening, but I can still help you with your situation immediately. Are there any children or animals that I should be aware of_?"

" _okay. dog's friendly, don't have to worry about him. here's my address, can you be here before dark_?"

She had guessed that there was a dog, based on the email handle, but it was a relief that there weren't children to be dealt with. Things always got messy when kids were involved. Furiosa plugged the address into the map and saw that it wasn't particularly far, maybe twenty minutes away.

" _I can be there by five_."

" _great! thanks_ :)"

She clicked out of the exchange, looked down at the torn-open cushions of the couch in resigned despair. Hopefully this person would be okay where they were for another day or two, just long enough for her to line up a better place for them to stay. Of course, if their situation was dire enough that they were serious about finding a hired gun, they probably wouldn't mind a few nights on a battered sofa.

Furiosa called Valkyrie to let her know the situation, reassured her that of course she would be alright handling it without backup, and then drove out to the address.

It was a small stand-alone house in a not-so-great neighborhood, the lawn getting a bit overgrown, a sleek but older black sports car parked in the driveway that she pulled her bike up next to. She slipped through the unlocked fence gate and knocked on the door; a dog started barking and she could hear a peculiar thump-drag-thump rhythm.

"Minute!" a man's voice called out, and men weren't usually who she dealt with as victims but it wasn't unheard of, either. Unless this was the abuser come home early. The dog stopped barking, the thumping got louder.

The door opened and revealed a man who had definitely seen better days. One of his arms was in a sling, the other clutched a single crutch with a scarred-up hand, the barely-faded shadow of a nasty bruise spanning the length of his face. There were more scars and scrapes visible on his arms, his shoulders, and probably more underneath the tank-top he was wearing. She'd been prepared for injuries as mentioned in the ad but this was more extensive than she had thought they might be- no matter he was looking for dramatic solutions.

"Here 'bout the trash?" he asked, shoulders hunched in tight like he was either in pain or expecting to be. The fact that he looked strong aside from the injuries meant nothing when it came to defending himself against domestic violence, she knew.

"Yeah, I'm here to help. Can I come in?" Furiosa replied, and there was a moment of hesitance before he nodded and stepped aside, awkward with one of his legs encased in a cast.

He was obviously skittish, protective of his space. It wasn't all that uncommon that even when seeking help people would try and keep you out as much as possible, ties of love and fear and a desire for privacy making her job harder.

What she _hadn't_ expected was that the apartment would smell so foul. For a heart-stopping second she wondered if he had already 'taken care of' the problem, and she was being recruited for the literal cleanup. It would be very bad for the both of them if she had stumbled across a sloppy murder. But the stench wasn't blood or sickly-sweet corpse, it was- molding vegetables, soured milk, tuna gone off, all with a heavy dose of artificial air freshener over the top.

"'S all in the kitchen," the man said and gestured down a hallway. "Bagged up already. Just can't lift anything, otherwise..."

Furiosa walked down the hallway he indicated and found a small kitchen piled with black trash bags clustered around a single garbage can.

"You meant literal garbage," she said, looked from the mess to the man's face in surprise.

The man hunched in on himself further, and it wasn't pain she was reading in his expression, it was _embarrassment_. Oh.

"'S what the ad said," he mumbled. "Just need this lot cleared out."

Furiosa wasn't really sure what to say. His ad had definitely raised red flags to her and she wasn't used to her intuition steering her wrong, but it was looking like he really had been talking about actual literal trash, not help getting out of a bad situation.

"Your ad was... somewhat misleading," she said.

He made an inquisitive sort of grunt, forehead wrinkling in confusion.

"I thought you were looking for a hired gun. Someone to 'take out the trash'."

His eyes went wide and startled, gaze darting around before he shook his head rather forcefully. "No," he sputtered, "I just- garbage." Then his eyes narrowed, zeroing in on her face. "You thought that and still came."

Furiosa shrugged. "I help people in bad situations, sometimes."

"You shouldn't even _say_ -"

"I wouldn't have killed anyone," she cut him off with. "Certainly not for a stranger. I was planning to talk about your options, offer you support or a room at a safe house if you needed it."

The man still looked skeptical, but there wasn't much more she was willing to reveal if he didn't actually need her help. Safe houses were only safe if they were secret, after all.

"You keep safe houses?" he asked after a moment, frowning a little bit.

"I know some places," she deflected. " _Are_ you in trouble?" It didn't seem likely- the more she examined what she could see of his place, the less likely it seemed that he shared space with anyone but the dog sniffing around his heels.

He shook his head, shifted uncomfortably on his crutch. "Wouldn't have thought," he mumbled, and Furiosa resisted the urge to pull a face at him. It was true that there were others more in line with what people thought of when they talked about crisis workers, all soft understanding eyes and gentle words. What people didn't realize was that wasn't always the best way to open, that sometimes you needed to show a victim how to be unafraid first before they would trust you.

The stench in the kitchen was really quite overwhelmingly atrocious now that the chemical spray was dying down, and looking at the man's condition she honestly believed he wasn't capable of carrying much at the moment. She might as well save him the trouble of finding yet another person to clear the place out.

"Where do you want these?" Furiosa asked, indicating the pile of bags.

The first few made it to the curb without problem, but then one of the bags split open as soon as she grabbed at it, rancid garbage slithering out onto the floor. She shoveled it back into a new bag with the help of some cardboard scraps, failing to hide a grimace.

"So how'd you get hurt?" she asked, one part curious and two parts just trying to take her mind off the trash she was scooping up.

"Car accident," he said, and yeah, she could see that.

"Not in that car out front," she said, because it was a little weathered but it certainly hadn't been damaged as bad as his injuries suggested.

He shook his head. "Patrol car."

Which was an interesting answer, because the only people she knew of who rode in patrol cars were police. Furiosa swept an assessing eye over him, but it was impossible to tell much from the way he was hunched in a chair, strapped up with injuries. It would do something to explain the older scars she had seen on his skin, at least.

"I was chasing a suspect," he continued, "Got- rammed, at an intersection." He made a twirling gesture with his free hand. "Flipped end over end. Crunch. Engine was still running- lucky it didn't blow 'fore I got pulled out."

"So you're a cop?" she asked, sweeping up the last of the garbage. Someone was going to have to mop the floor to get the slime off but it sure as fuck wasn't going to be her.

"Mhm, highway patrol."

She wouldn't have pegged him for it, he certainly wasn't like the police she had dealings with. But if he was on the roads then he wouldn't be, would he? Their network mostly had to put up with paper-pushers and thugs hiding behind badges, those who were about as likely to side with an abuser as uselessly stand aside entirely.

"Good thing you didn't get an actual hitman answering your ad, then," she said, and he gave an amused huff in return.

"I thought it was clear enough," he said. "Maybe you, ah, jump to conclusions."

"If I'm gonna jump to conclusions, it's going to have something to do with the several year's worth of dog mags you had in that bag. Did you really have to throw all that shit out now? It's damn heavy."

"I started cleaning up before the crash," he replied with a false sort of primness. "Didn't think it would just- sit around."

"You could have at least cracked a few windows," Furiosa said to make a show of pretending to disbelieve him, surprised by the playfulness in her voice, though of course the house was already opened up to disperse the late summer heat.

It had seemed odd that he'd have quite so many bags of trash piled up if his injuries were as fresh as they looked, when as far as she could tell he lived with just his dog. Another bag split open on the yard, this one filled with ratty clothes and oil-stained rags, a few random crumpled holiday decorations. He'd picked a hell of a time to do his spring cleaning, that was for sure.

"Thank you," the man said when she came in from taking out the last of them, and flashed her a grateful smile that nearly distracted from the bruising on his face. "Was gonna go mad."

She nodded in reply, already busy wiping off her hands with a disinfectant wipe. Less risk of shorting the mechanics in her prosthesis than sticking it under the tap, but good enough for now to at least make her skin stop crawling at the thought of the gunk lurking inside those bags- not all of them were filled with junk from his closets.

He passed her a glass of water after she tossed the wipes into the new trash bag he'd set out; she took it reflexively, not having expected the gesture.

Taking in her expression he twitched, and said, "Ah, I have coffee if you'd rather? Out of pretty much everything else."

"Water's fine, thanks," she replied, taking a sip of it more out of obligation than anything else. Now that she wasn't working on a task it was a little awkward to be standing around his kitchen while the man sat at the table, but taking a seat felt like it would mean she planned to stay longer.

"Is there anything else that needs doing?" she asked after a moment, setting the glass back down on the table. Some chores were all but impossible with only one hand, for all that she was pretty sure his arm wouldn't be incapacitated forever, and the crutch certainly wouldn't help matters any.

The man looked embarrassed again, but nodded his head. "Just- my bird-feeder. I can't reach it like this. If it's not too much to ask."

She raised an eyebrow in something not far from disbelief; he didn't really look the sort to have a bird-feeder, much less care that it went empty.

Instead of saying anything in his defense he just crutched his way over to a set of cabinets, contorting himself around the cast on his leg so he was able to pull it open. It was rather difficult to look at, honestly, because while he had an athletic build that ordinarily she wouldn't mind watching flex, he was obviously in a bit of pain as he did so.

The cabinet had one of those large bags of wild birdseed, heavy-looking enough that Furiosa didn't even give the man a chance to try and heft it.

"Okay, I believe you," she said, and restrained the urge to tell him to sit back down before he fucking fell over and broke something else. "Where's the feeder?"

"On the big tree," he replied, and since she had only passed two trees in his yard while dragging the bags out, it was easy enough to find. Unfortunately the sun was going down, and she couldn't quite see the lock mechanism well enough to get it open- meant to keep possums away, she would guess, but it wasn't doing her any favors either.

"Hey, can you turn a light on?" she called, and waited a moment. There was an indistinct noise that might have been the man replying, but the spotlight she could see attached to the side of the house stayed dark.

Furiosa huffed an annoyed breath and left the feeder, walked back to the door. "I said, could you put the light on? It's too dark to get that blasted thing open."

The man cringed. "It's gone out."

She took a moment to hold in a sigh. "That's why you wanted someone here before dark?" She had thought it had to do with an abusive partner getting home, or being in a rough neighborhood. But, she supposed, it wasn't as if the man could get on a ladder and change a lightbulb tucked under the roof with a broken leg.

He nodded. "Sorry. It's fine, about the birds. They'll live."

That was what made her sigh, how honestly apologetic but disappointed he seemed. "Where are your lightbulbs? And I'll need a ladder."

It was dangerous to leave that walkway unlit, especially when he was hardly mobile to start with. The paving stones were uneven, and she was sure that his dog didn't always want to come in straight away when it was turned out into the yard, and the man certainly didn't need to break any more bones.

Changing the light was easy, and with that done it was a cinch to get the feeder open and filled. Furiosa tucked the bag of birdseed back under the cabinet and regarded the man, who had yet another glass of water sitting on the table that he nudged her way.

"Anything else?" she asked.

He shook his head, fiddled with the edge of his arm sling. "We didn't figure a price," he said after a moment, "I've some cash, but- not enough for all the work, I think."

Furiosa gave a snort of amusement. "You obviously needed the help," she said, "Keep the money." She wasn't exactly rich, but her income was steady enough that taking this man's money for hauling away a few bags of trash and changing a light bulb felt something like extortion.

"Oh," he said, "Okay." He cleared his throat, and darted his gaze around for a moment, then fixed his eyes back on her face. "Should still repay you. I can order food? Or- um." He cut himself off and blinked in consternation, apparently out of options.

And the thing was, despite the incredibly unfavorable first impression, Furiosa was tempted to take him up on the offer. The house no longer smelled like rotting garbage, the man himself was- honestly, kind of _unfairly_ attractive under the bruising, and he cared enough about fucking birds to have a stranger make sure they got fed, even though they were wild animals and therefore capable of feeding their own damn selves.

There wasn't anyplace she needed to be, and his address was actually closer to her favorite delivery place than her own apartment. What the hell.

"Sure," she said after a moment of thinking it over. "Got the number for the Chinese place on King?"

The couch in the living room had obviously been turned into a sort of nest, musty blankets and empty take-away boxes piled round the edges that he hastily tried to clear away as she called in an order. But the TV was unobstructed, and though the dog sidled up close to smell at the food when it arrived it didn't try to actively steal any, so it was manageable.

The man flipped through the channels until landing on some mindless movie, action and cars and explosions. He made a questioning noise and she shrugged in reply; it was just background noise as far as she was concerned.

They meandered their way through a discussion about what sort of physical therapy he was looking forward to, bitched a while about the things that were impossible without a second hand. Normally talking about anything medical set Furiosa on edge, made her feel defensive, but his attitude was frank and self-aware enough that she found herself commiserating instead.

The movie wound to a close as the conversation did, the food picked over until only dregs remained.

"I should head out," she said, standing with a stretch. It wasn't _late_ , but it was certainly later than she had intended to stay, and it was half a miracle that Valkyrie was so far satisfied with a few 'everything's fine' texts.

"Thank you," the man said. "For helping, and for talking."

"Sure," she replied with a lazy shrug. "Just make sure you word your next ad a little better, okay?"

He flushed red, which was- dammit it was _not_ cute- and nodded his head. "I won't put out any hits unless I mean them," he said with a faint smile.

That should be the end of it; she'd spent the day helping him clean up, and he repaid her in food and conversation. Deal fulfilled. But Furiosa found herself impulsively scribbling her phone number on the back of the take-out receipt, and held it out for him to take.

"I only take calls for assassinations on weekdays," she said as casually as she could.

He took the receipt from her like he'd never gotten someone's number before, careful and surprised, and nodded his head. "Hey, um," he said, "What's your name?"

"Furiosa," she replied, and instead of making any sort of remark about it he only hummed like it was something perfectly ordinary.

"Max," he said, and tucked the slip of paper into his pocket with a pleased little smile before seeing her to the door.


End file.
